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Former Edo State Governor, Adams Oshiomhole, has berated the Edo chapter of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), over what he called undue criticisms of the Central Hospital Complex in Benin, which was commissioned at the tail end of his administration.
The former Governor, who was reacting to the allegation by the PDP that he borrowed equipment for the commissioning of the hospital by President Muhammadu Buhari when he came to commission the project last year, described the allegation as the “cry of people still licking their wounds from the Supreme Court defeat.’
Last week, the State chapter of PDP had described the reconstructed Central Hospital a big fraud.
The state Chairman of the party, Chief Dan Orbih, who regretted that the hospital had not been put to use in about one year after it was commissioned by President Muhammadu Buhari, blamed Oshiomhole, for the non-functioning of the hospital.
He stated that Oshiomhole succeeded in building a hall and called it hospital.
In Orbih’s words: “Now Obaseki has come out publicly to say that he could not fund the Central Hospital and that they will get private partners to run the hospital.
“Recall that during the commissioning of the hospital by President Buhari, Oshiomhole described it as a five-star hospital that was fully equipped to address the health needs of the people.”
He accused the present Governor Godwin Obaseki of acting Oshiom-hole’s script, saying he had long uncovered a plot hatched by the duo to bring in “companies run by their children as partners to run the hospital.”
However, speaking on Sunday, Oshiomhole said: “First, is that, it is good news for them to agree that a new hospital has been built because in some other statements, they had said there was no new hospital. I have seen the PDP turn out numbers that did not make sense even to a fool as regards the amount of the project.
“The only point that I think is worth commenting on is when I read somewhere that we hired or borrowed equipment to bring to the Hospital for the President to commission. Again, it shows how empty headed PDP leadership in Edo State and their spokesperson are.
“If you borrowed equipment from someone, how come the lender has not come to recover his equipment and those equipment are still there. The fortunate thing which everybody knows is the fact that the government I headed, paid 75 percent of the total value of the equipment that we have ordered and they are state-of-the-art equipment, as you can see even from the one that has been delivered and installed.
“But the contractor, Vermont, is not a one-man business; they are not one local contractor that the PDP can go and sublet contract to. Verment is recognised even in Europe. They run the largest hospital in Austria; they are world-class hospital equipment manufacturers, but they just got caught in the foreign exchange crisis, that they could not get enough forex to procure in other to order for the equipment. These are not equipment you order off the shelf.
“As we speak, go to that hospital tomorrow, you will find that equipment are coming and they are installing them. I must thank the CBN Governor who I had to call on the phone to assist us.
“Today, the equipment are arriving and they are installing, and I know for sure from my last inquiry I know that they will be done by October. Then the hospital will have state of the art equipment better than any hospital anywhere in Nigeria by the time those equipment are installed. That is my dream and I am glad that is the reality.
“I don’t want to join issues with people who are leaking their wounds. My pride is that the PDP said; ‘who is he, he thinks that politics is labour, we will teach him a lesson.’ Under eight years, I am their professor and they are all failed politicians from their oga to the least of them,” Oshiomhole taunted.